perchance to dream
by shadesunrider13
Summary: Every winter finds Urthstripe's sleep troubled with nightmares, but this year it's not just the nightmares keeping him awake. The Mountain Lord tries to adjust to adoptive fatherhood. Part 3 of Shifting the Sun: Tales of Salamandastron.


He dreams of them, sometimes. Every night they bear different wounds, all of them horrid, all of them lethal. Their blood drips from the walls, leaks into the water. Every cup he brings to his lips is filled to the brim with crimson liquid. He's always hungry and endlessly thirsty, but everything he puts in his mouth crunches like dry twigs and turns to ashes. Everything is white. The snow, the bare branches of the trees, the endless open sky above him. It's all white, except for the shadows behind him, and the blood that follows him in trails and rivulets.

He has the same nightmare every time, and he never remembers it all the way when he wakes up. Voices somewhere above him, calm and soothing and familiar – and then another voice, unfamiliar, smooth and unctuous and friendly. He doesn't like that voice. It leaves a bad taste in his mouth, like his favorite food – blackberries – when they've gone sour and rotten. He stays put underneath the table, huddled against one of its sturdy oaken legs, and he listens to the familiar voices. Those are the voices he can trust, the voices who know what's right and what's wrong, what's safe and what's not. But those voices are listening to the strange voice, and the longer the strange voice keeps talking, the more unsettled he feels.

He never knows what happens next. Beheading, maybe. Stabbing to death. Disembowelment. Amputation of one limb after another until they're nothing but a bleeding torso and a head. Slit throats or death by a thousand cuts. No matter how it happens, it always ends the same way. The familiar voices silenced. The unfamiliar one laughing. And blinking up into flickering lights, and a pair of blue eyes smiling down at him. He hates those blue eyes. He hates them, but he's small and they're high above him and there's nothing he can do but reach up and up and up with his paws.

He hears them leaving, their footsteps fading, and he scrambles unsteadily to his feet. He stumbles after them, following that friendly voice, those smiling eyes. The ground is cold and soft and the air is even colder. He can see his breath in white clouds and he waves them away with one paw. They're laughing ahead of him, somewhere, but their voices are getting fainter and fainter, and he can't keep up. He can't keep up, and it's so cold. His mother always told him not to go out in winter without a coat, but he's gone out, and now the wind is tearing through his fur.

The voices are gone. He stops moving forward, turns in a little circle, and that's when he realizes he doesn't know where he is. He's never been this far away from home before, at least not alone. He covers his eyes with his paws, wishing with all his might that he'd never his parents' cave. Someone is crying in the distance, the thin, hitching cry of a frightened infant. The cold is lessening, his body going numb, and the crying is getting louder. Louder and louder and piercing and shrill and –

And all of a sudden, Urthstripe's awake. He's in his bed in the forge room. Not a child any longer, alone in the woods in the depths of winter. He's the Lord of Salamandastron, a fully grown badger, stronger than any vermin who would dare challenge him, and the infant badger he discovered in the dunes is sobbing in her cradle.

Urthstripe throws back the blanket and crosses the room to the cradle. In the darkness, he can't see much of the child but her white headstripes and her open, wailing mouth. He reaches into the cradle and scoops her out, thinking that maybe she's lonely, that maybe holding her will help, but she only wails louder. Urthstripe begins to pace the room, bouncing the infant in his arms. Her cries take on a strange, oscillating aspect, and Urthstripe tries to think through what Windpaw told him about caring for babies. When they cry, they're either hungry, thirsty, tired, or lonely. He's holding her, so she can't be lonely, and she was crying in her cradle, which means she isn't tired. Hungry or thirsty.

These, at least, are problems Urthstripe can fix. He feels around on the windowsill for the bottle of greensap milk that's chilling there and nearly knocks it over. Cursing to himself, he rights it again, adjusts his grip on the infant, and tilts the bottle against her mouth. She's not too good at swallowing, and plenty of milk dribbles out the sides of her mouth and onto Urthstripe's tunic, but enough of it gets into her stomach to keep her satisfied, and she doesn't try to spit the bottle out to continue crying. Satisfied that the crisis has been averted, at least momentarily, Urthstripe sits down on the edge of his bed and continues to feed the infant the rest of the milk.

He was dreaming about something before, wasn't he? The sense of disquiet he felt when he woke up has persisted, even though he's identified the source of the crying and is taking steps to fix it. He tries to put the fear out of his mind and focuses his attention on another subject; the infant in his arms, the one he rescued three nights ago.

He found her at dusk, in the shadow of one of the large dunes near the edge of Mossflower. It was at the end of a routine patrol, one of the few Urthstripe goes on these days, and it's a good thing he did, too – the hares he was with were against pursuing the thin infant's wail, the fragile sound that could be a trick of the wind. Urthstripe left the patrol behind to seek out the source of the noise, and the end result of that decision is the situation now. Windpaw advised sending the child on to Redwall Abbey, which is far more equipped to care for young ones than Salamandastron is. Sapwood even offered to make the trip himself. But something in Urthstripe rebelled at sending the child off again.

A knock on the door startles him. He turns around. "Who's there?"

"Just me, milord." Windpaw pushes open the door slightly. "May I come in?"

Urthstripe nods, and the hare steps into the room. "I heard the young one cryin'," she says by way of explanation. "Thought you might need some help."

"Thank you, but I think I have the situation in hand," Urthstripe says.

Windpaw nods, smiles. "Have you named her yet?"

"No." Urthstripe adjusts the angle of the milk bottle and the infant keeps drinking. "It's not my place."

"Pardon me, milord, but I think it is," Windpaw says. She gestures at the infant. "If you're still set on keeping her –"

"I am."

"All right, all right," Windpaw says, "but if you mean to keep her, that makes you her father now. Her father, at least until her parents come back."

"They aren't coming back." The bottle is empty. Urthstripe sets it aside, pulls his sleeve over his paw, and starts wiping the dribbles of milk from the sides of the infant's mouth.

"What makes you so sure?"

The infant opens her eyes, blinks up at Urthstripe. Her eyes are soft and brown. She yawns, revealing a pink tongue, and bathes Urthstripe in breath that smells of greensap milk. Her headstripes have gone spiky, and Urthstripe smooths them out with a paw that's bigger than her head. "What makes me sure?" he repeats, rocking the infant slowly as her eyes fall shut. "No living parent would abandon their child."

"Well," Windpaw says, standing up and stretching, "if you don't mind me sayin', milord, she's lucky you found her. Best start working on a name for her. We can't just keep callin' her 'the baby' all the time."

Urthstripe smiles. "I'll work on that. Goodnight, Windpaw."

"Goodnight, milord."

Windpaw slips out the door, leaving Urthstripe alone with the infant. He looks down at her again. Her brown eyes have fallen shut, and she's breathing lightly and evenly, asleep again. Urthstripe stands up and walks to the cradle, but when he moves to set her down, something strange happens. Something twinges in his chest at the thought of letting her go, but he pushes it away. He sets her down in the cradle, but when he goes back to his own bed, he drags the cradle with him. Now it's only an arm's length away from him at any given moment; if the infant needs him, he'll be there in seconds. This infant, whatever her name will be, whoever she will grow up to be, will never be alone like he was as a child.

Urthstripe closes his eyes. Keeps one paw on the edge of the cradle, rocking it gently. Tries to fall asleep like that. Tries to stop thinking of the child as 'the infant' and start thinking of her as his daughter.


End file.
